Final Submission to Canada’s Public Inquiry into Foreign Interference

In September 2023, in response to growing concern about foreign interference in Canada’s electoral processes and democratic institutions, the government established a commission to conduct the Public Inquiry into Foreign Interference with the aim of addressing foreign influence and strengthening national security. The commission’s mandate included evaluating current policies, practices and systems that address foreign interference; enhancing transparency; and recommending improvements for more effective governance.

In this special report, Wesley Wark and Aaron Shull present the text of CIGI’s final submission to the commission, containing 14 recommendations that reflect a need to achieve higher levels of strategic transparency concerning foreign interference threats, the value of a further systematic review of the Canadian national security and intelligence (NSI) system, targeted improvements to the capacity of the NSI community, and measures to achieve greater political actor literacy on foreign interference threats.

In July, Canada’s top soldier, General Jennie Carignan, said that Canada and its allies may have as little as five years to prepare for emerging threats, including advanced missile technology from countries such as China and Russia. Yet Canada remains an outlier in meeting its NATO defence commitments.

In this op-ed first published in The Globe and Mail, Ann Fitz-Gerald and Halyna Padalko write that Canada’s 2024 Defence Policy Update lacks a clear plan of action. “It is time for Canada to step up. With the world growing more dangerous, Canadians are beginning to understand the need for a strong military — not as a tool of aggression but as a means of safeguarding our values and place in the world.”

Wesley Wark writes that wars end in one of three fashions: through victory and the imposition of peace terms; through exhaustion and stalemate, driving the belligerents to the peace table; or by outside intervention from a power able to force an end to the fighting. “Which of these scenarios might apply in the coming months to the war in Ukraine, the largest conventional war in Europe since the end of the Second World War?”

Wark argues that victory for either side seems far off, and the fighting on the ground has not yet created a stalemate that either Russians or Ukrainians would recognize. “That leaves the third scenario. Enter the peacemaker, in the unlikely form of incoming US President Donald Trump...Whether he has a realistic plan to deal with the war is something to wait and see, but we have some tea leaves to read.”

“‘In the future, everyone’s lives can be better than anyone’s life is now,’ wrote OpenAI’s leader Sam Altman in a September blog post....Altman insists artificial intelligence (AI) will soon outperform the mental abilities of most people. Afterward, he foresees climate change being solved, poverty erased and humanity colonizing space. All of this, Altman claims, is just around the corner — if only tech titans receive enough resources and leeway.”

In this opinion, Kyle Hiebert takes a look at Silicon Valley’s “AI fever dreams” against the mounting evidence of the technology’s risks and limitations, writing that “increasingly, industry hype around AI delivering universal prosperity is being punctured by the real-world liabilities of its development.”